Review: Winter

23:10 Cilla 2 Comments

Title: Winter
Author: Marissa Meyer
Publisher: Feiwel and Friends
Source: Periplus Online
Synopsis: Princess Winter is admired by the Lunar people for her grace and kindness, and despite the scars that mar her face, her beauty is said to be even more breathtaking than that of her stepmother, Queen Levana.

Winter despises her stepmother, and knows Levana won’t approve of her feelings for her childhood friend—the handsome palace guard, Jacin. But Winter isn’t as weak as Levana believes her to be and she’s been undermining her stepmother’s wishes for years. Together with the cyborg mechanic, Cinder, and her allies, Winter might even have the power to launch a revolution and win a war that’s been raging for far too long.

Can Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter defeat Levana and find their happily ever afters?

Review: ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆

She’s our lost princess. And she’s coming home.

I was so SO excited to finally have this book in my hands. The Lunar Chronicles have stolen my heart from the get-go, so my expectations were ridiculously high for its final installment. I wanted Winter to be another heroine who was fierce in her own rights. I wanted to see my ships sail into the sunset. I wanted Meyer's usual fabulous world-building with Luna. I wanted the revolution we were promised in Cress.

Luckily, Winter does not disappoint.

As our band of rebels inch closer toward making their plan for Luna takeover a reality, we are introduced to Winter, a princess who is 'more beautiful than a bouquet of roses and crazier than a headless chicken'. She has chosen to not use her Lunar gift and, as a result, is suffering from Lunar sickness. Seeing the world from her eyes is really fascinating, especially since she isn't always as off-balance as others would believe. While the sickness is clearly a burden for her, there are times when she manages to turn it to her advantage. Once again, Meyer has created a heroine who is flawed and fragile but has a streak of steel within her.

(Also, Winter's hallucinations made think of the scene in the Disney version of Snow White, where the princess ran through the woods and thought the trees were trying to kill her. I don't know if Meyer intended that, but that's still pretty cool.)

There is plenty of romance to keep this shipper happy. (Confession: I did a lot of unintelligible squealing particularly around the progress of Thorne and Cress' relationship.) While we know who will end up with who, and even when characters find their happy endings, it isn't perfect nor smooth, and I like it that way.

The world-building is once again terrific. The pacing is a little inconsistent at times as the book shifts between times of anxious planning to moments of action and back again, but I anticipated that with 800+ pages and so much to cover. Also, while some of the darker themes regarding Lunar mind-control and glamour, as well as the violence of a revolution, weren't entirely spelled out, they were definitely present in the pages. It is a revolution in a dystopia, after all; things cannot progress cleanly.

I leave this series satisfied and a little sad that I'm not going to go on another adventure on the Rampion. Of course, there will be Stars Above, but it won't be the same. Nevertheless, this is the first series since Harry Potter that has managed to immerse me in its worlds so completely. For that, I am grateful.